In search of scapegoats, exclusion past and present

Political cartoon from the Puck in 1882. Caption reads: “The Anti-Chinese Wall: The American Wall Goes Up as the Chinese Original Goes Down.”

Photo: Courtesy Library of Congress

The foreigners were taking away jobs and driving down wages of American workers. Their customs were immoral, their ways a danger to good order. After mounting public outcry, Congress banned them from entering the country.

The year? 1882. The foreigners? Chinese laborers, who had first arrived in the United States during the Gold Rush. Battling virulent xenophobia, they faced down mobs and suffered massacres in the years leading up to our country’s first attempt at restricting immigration — a law that perpetrated educational segregation and forced registrations, and would tear apart families for generations.

It’s happening all over again, historians and documentary filmmakers say, but this time, Latinos and Muslims are the new targets. The issue has become central to the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has called for a border wall with Mexico and a ban on immigration from countries with a record of terrorism, and questioned the loyalty of immigrants and the children of immigrants.

“It’s always the case where you take the most vulnerable population, who can’t vote, are new here, who don’t have political power, and they become the scapegoat for every issue worrying the nation,” said Ric Burns, co-director of a new PBS documentary about the Chinese Exclusion Act coming out in the spring.

San Francisco’s Center for Asian American Media, which is co-producing the documentary, has also launched an online fundraising campaign at WeDidIt to create and distribute curriculum to accompany classroom screenings about the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the era in which immigration from China slowed to a trickle except for merchants, teachers, students, diplomats and their servants, and the children of American-born parents.

Some Chinese tried to get around the law by bringing in children who weren’t their own, who came to be known as “paper sons” — that is to say, arriving on fraudulent documentation that claimed blood relationships.

In 1918, Lee Chi Yet, an impoverished orphan, escaped the chaos of the southern coast of China as a paper son. “My eye just looking for a way to get out. I want to live, so I come to the United States,” he would tell his granddaughter decades later.

During the exclusion era, Chinese Americans brought 10,000 cases before federal courts and set a number of legal precedents — including, in the case of Wong Kim Ark, birthright citizenship, which has come under fire in recent years.

Despite that victory, Chinese immigrants such as Lee were detained at Angel Island Immigration Station for weeks or months, probed in humiliating examinations and questioned on the minute details of family history, the layout of their village and their home in China.

Detainees carved poignant poems into the barrack walls: “How was I to know I would become a prisoner suffering in the wooden building? The barbarians’ abuse is really difficult to take/ When my family’s circumstances stir my emotions, a double stream of tears flows.”

“We were victims of an unjust system,” said historian Erika Lee, granddaughter of Chi Yet. “You had to resort to these kinds of strategies to come in. It always irks me when people talk about how their grandparents came in the ‘right’ way because frankly, for almost all European immigrant groups, there was no wrong way. The doors were completely open. It’s not a fair comparison.”

Congress repealed the Exclusion Act in 1943, when China became an ally of the United States during World War II. Growing up in the East Bay, Lee didn’t learn much about Chinese American history — not in school, and not from her family. But in college, she conducted an oral history of her grandfather and later on, in graduate school at Cal, she read his immigration file.

“It struck me so deeply, how brutal the system was designed to keep Chinese out. He was one of the lucky ones who managed to get in. It could have gone either way,” said Lee, who appears in the documentary and whose most recent book, “The Making of Asian America,” is now in paperback.

Like Lee, I didn’t learn about the act in much detail until I started covering the Asian American community and I began to understand how a law passed more than a century ago reverberates today.

In 2011, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution expressing regret for the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The House followed a year later. China now sends the most immigrants to the U.S. of any country — 147,000 in 2013 — surpassing both Mexico and India, but the act has forever shaped national attitudes toward race, politics and identity.

“Some newer immigrants might think that this history has nothing to do with us — but it tremendously has to do with us,” said Li-Shin Yu, the documentary’s co-director. “Look at the bamboo ceilings across every industry, the perpetual ‘otherness’ of Asians in this country — it’s all a legacy.”

Vanessa Hua is a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the Hartford Courant and the Los Angeles Times. At The Chronicle, she launched an investigation that led to the resignation of the California secretary of state and prompted investigations by the FBI.

She’s won a number of journalism awards from groups including the Asian American Journalist Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. She also won the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.

Her short-story collection, “Deceit and Other Possibilities,” will be published by Willow Books in the fall, and she recently signed a contract with Ballantine Books to publish two novels: “A River of Stars,” which won a Rona Jaffe Award, and “The Sea Places.”